Shostakovich is tricky. Performances can be heavy on the dour for this guy, particularly ones made after his death. It's as if everyone is saying, OK, here is A Master; we must be reverent. But it's never really genuine reverence. More like lugubriousness. Reverent would respect the music, letting it be itself without needing to force it into a long-faced version of itself.
I got interested in various recordings of the piano trio nr. 2. It's a lively work, full of dance and sparkle. But you'd never know that in most recordings of it. The most interesting pair, for my thesis, are the ones the Beaux Arts did, one while Shostakovich was alive, one after he had died. The early one is the finest performance of it I've ever heard, precise, lively, moving through all the quick changes with elegance and elan. It fair crackles with spirit and liveliness. The later one is funereal. It's slow and solemn and sanctimonious. It is a pompous rendering of A Great Work by A Great Master.
I think my entire conception of this piece changed when I heard the two recordings Shostakovich himself made at the piano, both in the 1940s. He plays fast, often much faster than any modern musician would dare to, & his playing is clean and objective and completely lacking in sentimentality. The work has dry humour but also a kind of ferocious relentlessness, especially in the last movement, which recalls that his personal reaction to unjustified or premature death was always anger. The piece is a memorial, sure, but he believed death was something to be fought against, not a reason to slow down and contemplate.
I had a similar reaction to the 24 Preludes & Fugues which I got to know originally through a number of recordings made after Shostakovich's death by artists who worked with him: Tatyana Nikolayeva (the dedicatee), Vladimir Ashkenazy, individual selections by Sviatoslav Richter etc. Then I heard the complete recording by Roger Woodward, who not only attempts to emulate Shostakovich's clean, objective piano style but also takes seriously Shostakovich's notoriously fast metronome marks (even Nikolayeva's first recording, made in the presence of the composer, disregards them; Shostakovich was clearly comfortable with a wide range of interpretations of his own music). The 24 Preludes and Fugues have often been reviewed as anodyne, soporific, etc (most famously by Richard Taruskin) but while one might initially rebel at the tempi Woodward sets in the C major, as one keeps listening they're revealed to be definitely not anodyne or soporific, but rather witty, quirky, neoclassical and sometimes exceptionally violent. Even the slower movements have an inner agitation to them that keeps them moving. This is why I make a big deal about metronome marks; they do a great deal to indicate the character of a piece, even if you as the performer aren't going to follow them to the letter all the time.
(Everything by Shostakovich is generally these days performed 15-25% slower than he indicated. He is of course not the only composer with this problem.)
